"Gretchen?"
"I call her Gretchen; she don't look as if she knew beans, does she? Well, she don't. She was going on in the pantry yesterday about the rights of man. I knew she was due to break a saucer pretty soon. Well, she did. And we've got a Swede girl here who would be the best all around one of the lot if it wasn't for her temper. All of a sudden she gets mad and she stays mad, and you can't for the life of you find out what it was that made her mad. Those three Irish girls are pretty smart. H'm, yes; they were rigging up a strike Tuesday. They wanted fifty cents a week more. They found out their want at a quarter to twelve. 'All right, girls,' says I, 'you can go out if you want. Our regular people will kick and go somewhere else for a few days, perhaps; but the first rainy noon they'll all come in again, and they'll see that things are running all right with a new crew, and after that they'll stay.' Goodness me! I've heard more about rights and less about duties this last week than I ever did before in my life. My uncle says it's the same with him. He's the engineer here. He really got me this place. If you look down through that grating out there as you go along you may see him. It's talk and argue all the time—his men have more half-baked notions than you can think of, and he's kept on the k'jump all the time looking after things. Do I kick? Do I squeal? Not much. And if I had come in from outside with a different language, maybe, and a different training and a different set of notions, and if I had been a real, dyed-in-the-wool, down-trodden peasant and all my folks the same for nobody knows how far back, perhaps I'd find some reason there for not keeping abreast with the tolerably smart lot of people that had let me in."
She cast a lofty eye over her various underlings. "Kind of a plain lot, ain't we? You know there's one place like this in town where they won't take a girl unless she's pretty. Their cashier is a regular bute. But I wouldn't work in such a place; no, indeed."
She paused. Ogden made no response. She eyed him with a sharp impatience.
"Not but what I could, though, if I had a mind," she remarked, with a vindictive little explosion.
"No, I couldn't, either," she added suddenly; "they're all brunettes this year."
And she laughed forgivingly.
"And you don't see me a-wearing rings and chains," she pursued; "I guess not. And I sha'n't, either, until I finish my course."
"Course"? Was she hinting at the close of her earthly career?
"Yep. Shorthand. But don't hurry away." He had dropped his feet to the floor. "Duggan went right off after the rush, and I guess I've been hard pushed enough to enjoy a little restful conversation. Shorthand and typewriting—that's what I'm steering for. I'll stand this for a while—until I can do eighty words. I've begun at the Athenaeum already. I don't see why anybody should want to take 'lessons' in typewriting; it's practice you want. Same with the other. Well, I'm practising hard enough. I-shall-be ready for b-usiness in-three-months," she traced with her finger on the counter, giving considerable pressure to the "b" in "business." "I'm ahead of the class now.